Some dude describes why wow is better than its ever been. The 1-2 months to cap in vanilla is bullshit, and definitely not sure I agree with the rest of it, but otherwise an interesting read:

Quote :

"As someone that's been playing MMOs since Everquest released Kunark, and has been playing WoW since release (46 fucking days short of that god damn statue, FUCK YOU, BLIZZARD), I could not disagree more.

First, you're under the impression that WoW didn't always cater to the "masses of idiots." That literally couldn't be further from the truth. Do you know what made WoW so popular? Why it exploded like it did in popularity when it came out? Because it catered to the "masses of idiots." Seriously, WoW was the E Z MMO to play compared to Dark Age of Camelot, Lineage 2, Everquest, Ultima Online, etc. It was so user friendly. It gave you so much direction in helping you understand WTF to do. Leveling was so EASY compared to other MMOs. It had QUESTS! It marked people with quests. To start a quest, you just right clicked an NPC with a quest then clicked the quest and hit accept. Suddenly the process of getting max level was shaved down from 6-8 months for the average player to a measly 1 or 2.

I could sit here and go on for hours and hours about the Quality of Life improvements WoW had over every other MMO on the market, and why everyone who came from any other MMO considered it incredibly easy compared to anything else on the market.

Second, while WoW has added a number of improvements and changes dedicated to making basic content take less time, that doesn't mean they made it "easier." Most of the changes over the last decade have been geared towards making people spend less time on the gates to content so players could spend more time on the actual content. Leveling is nothing but a time gate before you can actually start playing the game. It's why you get to just... skip it now. Other gates include attunements, rep grinds, and long long gearing processes. Attunements were awful. Seriously, who enjoyed those? The story and concept were really cool. But the actual process of getting through any given attunement was just dumping hours upon hours into the game doing boring, mindless grinding. Most people that want it back look at it with rose colored glasses. Mandatory rep grinds were stupid. If people wanna spend hours upon hours killing the same mobs over and over again to get a rep up, more power to them. But I'll pass thanks. And being forced to do that so I got access to an enchant was the worst thing ever. And then there's the gear grind. People get upset when players get gear. They want it to be some grueling process, because they see gear as "the point." It isn't. It's just another gating tool. My ideal system has no gear at all, and you do fights just for the fun of doing fights, but that's me and I get that. But making players take weeks upon weeks to get enough gear just to do the content they want isn't "hard." It's just very time consuming.

The truth of the matter is all Blizzard has done on the scale of "difficulty" is streamlined stuff that used to require a lot of time. Interestingly, things that are supposed to require legitimate difficulty are far far harder now than they ever have been before. As someone that's been top end raiding for years, the fights just continue to get more challenging. Likewise, the PvP scene continues to get more and more competitive. I think the reason BC was the "golden age" of Arenas is because, at the time, people had no fucking idea how to arena optimally. It was fun not because of balance, but because people didn't know every minute detail of how to exploit any lack of balance. Now, the skill levels at the top end of arenas is insane compared to back in the day.

TL;DR Blizzard didn't "sell out." They made legitimate improvements to the game. Things taking forever to do "just because" was never fun, and Blizzard has always made it their goal to be the most streamlined, "user friendly" game possible."

I guess Blizz does like to polish the fuck out of anything they put their name on, so I guess I could see it being a big deal to get the infrastructure up on it.

At the end of the day though, although Legion (and maybe the movie) will most likely change this, WoW is losing 1,000,000 subs a quarter. Despite the new content, most people are clearly not happy with what WoW is now. What did WoD get back, 7,000,000 people? And they were all gone a month later? That wasn't content patch related, it was state of the game related. I think anything that brings people back is great.